Davina McCall has said she was “brutally honest” with her children about her previous struggles with drug addiction because she feared they may find out from the internet.

The television presenter, 50, battled substance abuse in her 20s.

She said she told her children – Holly, 16, Tilly, 14, and Chester, 11 – because she did not want someone else to tell them or for them to find out online.

McCall said on the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast: “I’ve had to be (honest), because they have access to the internet.

“Actually, I had to be brutally honest quite early on when I thought other kids at school might talk to them about it.

“They grew up to ‘Mummy’s going to a meeting’ – they just didn’t know it was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.”

She continued: “When each of them got to about 10 or 11 I’d say, ‘Let me explain what those meetings are’. I’d say, ‘Mummy had a problem but I stopped a long time ago and these meetings help me stay on the straight and narrow’.”

McCall said her children, from her former marriage with Matthew Robertson, were “all really very accepting”.

She said: “They’d say, ‘I thought it was something like that. Is that why you don’t drink?’

“Kids know stuff. I never really give them credit for what they know, but they are smart like that.”

McCall announced last year that she and Robertson had separated after 17 years.